NOTE:The following is assembled from three blog posts from April 2003; it was not written as a single
essay, and parts respond to some out-of-date blog
conversations.Some links might be
broken.I post it here nonetheless,
because undergraduate and MA students often ask how to decide between political
theory/ political science doctoral programs and political philosophy/
philosophy doctoral programs.

POLITICAL THEORY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: This will be a little meandering, inductive rather than deductive, and
impressionistic rather than precise. But that, as we shall see, is part of the
point!

(One qualifier before I begin: In order to compare Granny Smiths with Golden Deliciouses, I'm going to emphasize Anglo-American
political theory and political philosophy. Adding the Anglo-American/
Continental distinction to the mix makes matters more confused still. I think
political theorists are typically more open to Continental approaches than are
political philosophers, sharpening the institutuional
differentiation; but among Continental practitioners, the theory-philosophy
distinction is less sharp than it is among Anglo-American types. If that didn't
make any sense to you, ignore it and move on.)

In the U.S., we start with the obvious difference. Political theorists ordinarily
receive their PhDs from, and ordinarily teach in, political science
departments. Political philosophers from, and in, philosophy
departments. The two groups study much the same questions, read and
write for much the same journals, and attend many (not all) of the same
conferences. They are intellectual next-door neighbors; to mix metaphors, the
wall between the humanities and the social sciences distinction is very thin at
this point. But they have different institutional homes. There are some
exceptions. Some philosophy PhD s are hired directly
into political science departments, though the reverse is almost never true.
Some philosophers' interests gradually migrate toward more empirical or historical
work (about which more below), and they switch over. And those who receive
degrees from outside the U.S. are sometimes difficult to pigeonhole and
are able to move back and forth across the division. (Some of them are
difficult to pigeonhole and therefore fall between the cracks, satisfying
neither set of hiring committees.)

Given the structure of American doctoral programs, this means that a political
theorist and a political philosopher-- even if they have complete overlap in
their core interests-- will be differently trained. The philosopher will almost
certainly study formal logic, very likely study ethics and moral philosophy
broadly rather than political philosophy narrowly (and, often, legal philosohy as well), and study at least some topics from
philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaethics. The theorist may well take statistics and/or
formal theory (i.e. rational choice and game theoretic mathematical models).
The theorist will certainly study one or more of American politics, comparative
politics, and international relations in some depth, and may
also study American or comparative constitutional law.

All of this means that theorists and philosophers, even when thinking or
writing about the same questions, have different intellectual backup resources.
To put it crudely: a political philosopher is much more likely to appeal to a
higher level of abstraction (to general ethical theory, then to metaethics, then to epistemology...) while a political
theorist is much more likely to appeal to a lower level of abstraction
(empirical findings, history).

Relatedly—though this is probably the weakest
tendency I’ll mention—theorists tend to be more interested in institutions, in
normative analyses of political systems as a whole, and more willing to think
that politics is importantly distinct from other realms of ethics. Sometimes
“political philosophers” are simply ethicists and moral philosophers who apply
their familiar tools to new situations. What a policymaker should do is treated
as a special case of what the person standing at the trolley switch should do.
This is not true of Rawls, and indeed isn’t true of many of the most prominent
political philosophers. (Interestingly, it is sort of true of Nozick.) Moreover, some theorists tend this way themselves.
But (as Matt
Yglesias notes), for this sort of reason
theorists have a loose tendency to find the turn to “political liberalism” in
late Rawls both more comprehensible and more justifiable than do philosophers.

Matt Yglesias said (in a post I can no longer find to
link to, due to his MT troubles) that the Andy Sabl
piece on Micah Schwartzman's blog, like many
arguments by those who dirty their hands with empirical claims, left him not
quite able to sort out the level of abstraction at which the argument was
supposed to operate. That's a fair comment about a lot of political theory. The
bad news is that that can allow a certain slipperiness of argument and a
mishmash of approaches. Turning a normative question into an empirical one can
happen at lots of different points in the argument. (It's usually more
transparent, and done for more narrowly-defined reasons, when one moves from a
normative question to a metaethical one.) The good
news is that it allows theorists to be very open to the messiness of the world.
Throwing around excessively stylized or stipulated or hypothetical facts gets
you into trouble when you're surrounded by social scientists (other than
economists and economist wanna-bes). There are many
empirical questions that are relevant to many normative ones-- questions about
the short- and medium-term stability of the political coalition that would
support the normatively-preferred policies, about the kinds of institutions
that could bring them about, about the moral psychology or social psychology
being assumed by the policies, about macrohistorical
changes like industrialization and globalization that might render the policies
obsolete or counterproductive, and so on.Knowing
which facts about the world to accept as given and which to treat as subject to
deliberate reform in a normatively desirable direction-- this is tricky,
complicated, and not prone to satisfactory resolution. As a theorist, I think
that that means messiness is likely to characterize the best normative
arguments. But I also recognize that it deprives those arguments of a great
deal of their rigor.

One way I have described the philosophy-theory distinction is as one between
rigor and richness. Compare Rawls' Theory of Justice to Walzer'sSpheres
of Justice. (Ah, to have been at Harvard in the
1970s, able to hear Rawls and Nozick and Sen, Walzer and Shklar, all at the same institution!) In the
original position, rational agents understand the Humean
conditions of justice, and know nothing else about the society they are
entering (not even the stage of history it occupies). Rawls aspires to the
construction of a very determinate theory from quite minimal premisses, and proceeds with great rigor and
sophistication. Walzer moves back and forth across
space and time, telling lots of fascinating stories from lots of places and
moments. He constructs a list of "blocked exchanges" that one
prominent commentator referred to as an unparalleled exemplar of the idea of
"category mistakes," throwing together goods that can't in their
nature be sold, goods that Walzer thinks oughtn't be
sold, goods that can be given away but not sold, and things that aren't really
goods at all. It's extremely hard to get a grip on any real arguments. But
there's a richness and nuance that is missing in Rawls, an engagement with
moral psychology and with the interaction of different bits and pieces of a
society.

A rigorous argument has the capacity to be definitive and right. It also
has the capacity to rest on an unexamined, unmentioned premise that is false,
or to commit a fallacious leap-- and then to be simply wrong. A rich
argument is unlikely to be convincingly, compellingly, finally right. Many
readers of Theory of Justice have felt "Eureka" moments, or felt compelled to change
their minds. If you don't already share Michael Walzer's
intuitions about a lot of things, Spheres of Justice is pretty unlikely
to move you toward them. But a rich argument is also unlikely to be simply
refuted or shown to be flatly wrong. (This disqualifies it from being Popperian science-- but Popper never claimed that ethical
questions were relevantly like science.) And many readers of Spheres of
Justice learn something important from it, and bring away significant
lessons or changes in their understanding of things, even without being moved
to adopt Walzer's normative conclusions.

Nozick had a funny but thoughtful recurring riff
about "coercive" and "non-coercive" argumentation, the
difference between making arguments that seem, if they succeed, to require
assent in the listener and making those that are suggestive or inviting or
provoking rather than compelling. We ordinarily mean it as a compliment about
an argument if we describe it as a "compelling" one. Nozick asked us to think about that a bit more, most
memorably with his image of the perfect philosophers' argument, on the
"coercive" model, being the one that was so definitively correct that
it would set up sympathetic vibrations in the listener's brain and physically
force agreement. This has been the object of some derision and much puzzlement.
(For a very sympathetic and thoughtful account, see David Schmidtz's
introduction to his new edited volume, Robert Nozick.) Insofar as the model for a philosophical
argument is a mathematical proof, it seems bizarre to talk about one's freedom
to continue to disagree with a successful argument-- one might have both the
physical capacity and the legal liberty to disagree, but one is simply wrong.
Among political theorists, the aspiration to mathematical proof-level certainty
is much less in evidence; the hope for finality much diminished.

One political consequence of all this: philosophers are much more willing to be
radical in some important ways. Theorists are much more likely to insist on
remaining tethered to some core intuition or some (relatively unexamined)
political or moral virtue. A philosophers' argument seems to have the potential
to accomplish more. It can show that all persons have the right to an
unconditional basic income provided by the state, regardless of fitness to work
and availability of jobs. It can show that those with no eyeballs have a right
to have one, even if this requires coerced organ donation from those who have two
eyeballs. It can show that there's no such thing as deserving. It can show that
masturbation is morally intolerable (to tie this post back to recent
discussions on the Conspiracy), that the wealthy in the west are guilty of
murder for not transferring all of their available wealth to the starving and
ill in the developing world, and that adult rats have higher moral standing
than human newborns. Theorists are more likely to stick with a core moral
notion—revulsion at cruelty for Shklar, individuality
for Kateb, something like
individuality in Sabls’ response to Cohen—and to
build a theory around it. Perhaps the most interesting case here is Walzer, who tries to extract normative principles demanding
radical change from thick understandings of what he takes American’s shared
moral convictions to already be—not to compel agreement by argument, but to
show, like prophets used to show, that his audience at some level already
agrees with him.

To be more precise: philosophers (at least since Rawls introduced reflective
equilibrium) typically own up to relying on one or more intuitions. But they
aim to have those intuitions be parsimonious, a la axioms in mathematics,
physics, and (ostensibly) economics. The aim is to be able to go a long way
starting from fairly little. Theorists remain more closely tethered to
intuitions for longer.

There are debates within ethics that look like this. Kantians and radical utilitarians have always said to intuitionists and
sentimentalists that our gut-level views about the wrongness of the conclusions
reached by Kantian or utilitarian theory don’t constitute any argument against
them. There’s no reason to think that our intuitions and conditioned prereflective responses really reflect the demands of
morality; the point of moral argument is to be able to unsettle our
unreflective responses and practices. There are, of course, both intuitionists
and moral-sentimentalists among philosophers. But the major Anglo-American
political philosophers have mostly been either Kantians or utilitarians—the
two schools of ethics that are most universalistic and promise to be able to do
the most by way of argument. There are good reasons for this. For someone
concerned with the quality of arguments, there’s bound to be something
unsatisfying about final reliance on either intuitions or sentiments. Kantian
and utilitarian universalist
arguments look, well, more like real arguments. Theorists are—as a very
loose and general rule—less eager to follow either of these rigorous (in both
senses of the word) paths, and more willing to hold tight to familiar political
virtues.

Political theorists are notoriously more interested in the history of political
thought than are political philosophers. This has on occasion led to mutual
mocking: a political theorist doesn't know what he or she thinks unless he or
she can first tell you what Hobbes or Rousseau thought; a political philosopher
with a clever thought won't notice that it's a 2,500 year old thought, unless
that fact has been mentioned in a recent issue of the Journal of Philosophy or
Ethics. (Related: jokes about reading Rawls' "Justice as
Fairness" article counting as historical work; after all, it came out
before 1971.) There are some very distinguished historians of moral and
political philosophy in philosophy departments-- Jerome Schneewind,
KnudHaakonssen, etc, many
of them recently assembled for this conference on the
history of philosophy-- but they are rarely the avowed political philosophers.
When political philosophers turn to the history of political thought, it is
typically to extract an argument, not to study a particular person or group of
persons or set of influences. Theorists, sometimes sloppily and sometimes enrichingly and sometimes both, move back and forth between
historical and contemporary or normative arguments. This gives us, I think, a
rich vein to mine, a constant infusion of new-old ideas into current debates.
When contemporary debates show signs of becoming too formalistic and procedural
in their analyses of democracy and democratic institutions, there is a
reawakening of interest in Tocqueville, or in Madison's writings beyond Federalist 10, or in
Rousseau beyond the Social Contract. When arguments about multiculturalism get
stuck in a rut ("individual vs. group rights," for example) there's
an opportunity for someone to bring Montesquieu or Herder or Constant to bear
and to reframe the argunments. This is all partly
because of the fact that there can be relevant empirical claims at all sorts of
levels of abstraction or genera ity. So what we
extract from Tocqueville isn't a syllogism in ethical theory, but a very
complex web of causal arguments about social and polticial
change, about what changes go together and what trends-- perhaps independently
normatively desirable-- don't. Of course, like the back-and-forth between
normative and empirical claims, this also encourages a certain slipperiness and
sloppiness, an unwillingness to let claims be tested according to either
historical or philosophical rules.

Relatedly, political theorists and political
philosophers have somewhat different historical canons, and pay attention to
different works within them. Montesquieu and Tocqueville figure much more
prominently for theorists than for philosophers, Kant the reverse. Sidgwick remains almost unwritten about among theorists, Sidney among philosophers. Mill's On Liberty is
shared by the two groups, but his Utilitarianism has priority for one group,
Representative Government for the other. And so on. Theorists are more likely
to take an interest in political pamphleteers or activists or statesmen than
are philosophers, and more likely to take an interest in the
apparently-minor-and-of-the-moment writings by a canonical thinker (Rousseau's
Government of Poland). Philosophers care about the best-developed version of a
philosopher's core arguments; that means that they look at the central works
very closely. Theorists often care about a thinker's political engagement and
position, about context that can be provided by minor works and correspondence
and works by contemporaries. Some theorists follow this path all the way to Cambridge school contextualism;
most do not.

Not all theorists (or all philosophers!) have the same canon, of course.
Students of Leo Strauss put an emphasis onto Francis Bacon and Maimonides that is pretty alien to the rest of the
discipline; I'm unaware of any significant Straussian
treatment of Constant. (NB: Those influenced by Strauss are somewhat anomalous in
other ways. They place great weight on a practice they identify as
"philosophy," but mostly they study others who have engaged in that
practice rather than engaging in it themselves. They are strongly
pro-philosophy (as they understand it) and at least sometimes serious critics
of social science. Yet almost without fail they are located in political
science rather than philosophy departments, and few do work that contemporary
philosophers identify as philosophy.) But the general trend is that theorists cast
a wider net in the history of ideas, while overlooking some figures in the
history of ethics who are treated as central by those
philosophers who care about the history of moral philosophy. And, of course,
there is a tradeoff between breadth and depth. As Kieran Healey has
noted, philosophers reading a major historical (or contemporary!) text in a
seminar will proceed argument by argument, paragraph by paragraph, trying to
sort out exactly what's going on. A theory graduate seminar is much more likely
to race through a major work or two, several minor works or letters, and some
secondary literature, trying to get a sense of the theorist's major claims,
what they were arrayed against, and why they were thought to matter
politically. (Again, Straussians are an exception
here.)

The intellectual genealogy of analytic political philosophy travels throguh Rawls' argument about the autonomy of moral theory
back to conceptual analyses of concepts such as liberty (think the first few
sections of Berlin's "Two Concepts;" Berlin was later to abandon
analytic work, and his later writings are more like the final sections of that
essay). This in turn brings the geneaology back to
the Oxford analytic school of philosophy, whence also
grew analytic jurisprudence-- note that H.L.A. Hart's seminal book is called The
Concept of Law. The sub-discipline of analytic political philosophy
is relatively of a piece with the other sub-disciplines that grew out of the
Oxford analytic turn in philosophy-- which, in many departments in the
English-speaking world, are considered the whole of philosophy excepting only
the history of philosophy. (This doesn't mean that other philosophers
necessarily wholly accept them. In many departments, ethical, normative, and
political philosophy are considered decidedly poor cousins to philosophy of
mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology. Harvard and the University of Arizona are two of the departments where that hasnot traditionally been true.

Political theorists are situated in and trained by political science
departments without ever being so completely of them. The study of
normative political thought and the history of political thought is not an
outgrowth of the same social-scientific turn as the other sub-disciplines in
the field. The relationship is often uneasy, and a political theorist is much,
much less likely to self-identify as a political scientist than a political
philosopher is as a philosopher. I do; but I give my former advisor George Kateb hives by doing so, and for reasons I understand. The
two groups do share some common intellectual ancestry: Montesquieu and
Tocqueville are shared with the comparativists,
Hobbes with IR, Madison with the Americanists. There
are many people who combine political theoretic and political scientific
approaches, and some do it very well. But the rule, I think, is that political
theory sits much farther from the center of gravity in political science than
political philsophy does in philosophy. The
relationship works nonetheless, partly because the theorists have been in
"government" and "politics" departments since before
serious statistics were even developed, and so they were always there even
during the height of the behavioral revolution, and partly because political
science has an especially subfields-based structure in general, both at the
departmental level and at the overall professional level. Still, at the many
conferences that have political theorists and political philosophers, and not
philosophers of mind or statistical voting behavior scholars, there's an air of
"ah, now here are people who understand each other." And, mostly,
usually, we do...

UPDATE 1:

Russell
Arben Fox very helpfully and insightfully
provides what I admitted that I omitted-- a way to bring the continental-
Anglo-American distinction into the picture. Matt Yglesias follows up:

To use myself as an example, I go to Harvard
which is considered to be a quite historically-oriented [philosophy-- JTL]
department by American standards. Nevertheless, the list of authors I've never
been assigned in a philosophy class include not only the post-Kantian German
idealists and the continental postmodernists, but such seminal figures as
Aristotle, Kant, Hume, J.S. Mill, Descartes, and William James. I've also never
been assigned anything at all from the long period between Plato and Hobbes or
the shorter, but still big, period between Adam Smith and Frege.
At the same time, the only authors I've ever been asked to read in translation
are Plato, Frege, and one page of Wittgenstein. Of
course I've read many of these authors, but when they've been assigned it's
always been for non-philosophy courses.

What's especially odd about this is that I could tell you all about many of
these people since they're often commented by the authors I am assigned and
because it's very common to label such-and-such a position as "Humean, "Kantian," "Platonic,"
"Cartesian," "Aristotelian," or "Millian."
'Round the Harvard way "Kantian" more-or-less means
"correct" whereas "Humean" means
"clever argument but he's wrong" "Aristotelian" means
"go ask Michael Sandel in the Government
Department, we don't talk about that sort of thing here" and everything
else just means "wrong."

I had thought about
including a comment in my post that said philosophers were more likely to be
interested in proper adjectives-- the Kantian position, which translates as the
best (i.e. Korsgaard's) reconstruction of an argument
that Kant seems to have made, the Humean argument,
etc-- while political theorists were much more likely to write about proper
nouns, talking about an historical person's range of arguments in a way that
makes it difficult to extract an adjective from them. I couldn't figure out
whether that was fair or not, so I left it out. I was trying hard to write a
comparison of two closely-related and friendly but non-identical fields of
inquiry, not to write an apology for theory or a critique of philosophy. It's reading Rawls and Nozick that
got me started in this game, after all. But what Matt says seems to me broadly
representative (with important exceptions).

Maybe I subconsciously chose theory because my name ends in a pronounced vowel
and so is ineligible for conversion to an adjective ("Levyian"--
shudder). My first name ends in a consonant, but "Jacobin" and "Jacobite" are both already taken, and neither is
something I want to be remembered as...

UPDATE 2:

Lawrence
Solum and Nate
Oman have chimed in with posts on theory, philosophy, and law-- they percieve an intra-law distinction that parallels the one I
described between political theory and political philosophy, though Nate is troubled by it and Lawrence
less so. They put very well what I put much more briefly when AeonSkoble e-mailed me to ask
"What about law profs?"

Some other points from Aeon's e-mails:

As
to the "philosophers-rigor/theorists-richness" bit... I would say that work that most deserved to
be taken seriously is both. A rich but non-rigorous work, like Spheres of
Justice, doesn't accomplish much. But the same author's Just and Unjust Wars is
both rich and rigorous. Narveson and Schmidtz are both. On the theorist side, surely some are
both.

I'd still stand up for the accomplishment of Spheres,
but Aeon is certainly right to say that richness and
rigor together make for especially important and impressive work. One person
I'd mention in that light is Nuffield College (Oxford)'s David Miller-- a
first-rate example, by the way, of Tom
Runnacles'
point that at Oxford things are sometimes different. (Only sometimes; Oxford
can also be the world headquarters of pure analytic philosophy approaches, and
has housed some of the most important pure political philosophers and legal philosophers
in the world.)

In addition to the mechanism I described about graduate training in the two
different disciplines, Aeon noted

This is amplified,
though, by the fact that courses one is asked to teach typically will differ.
When I teach upper level courses on the nature of rights or different
conceptions of authority or the development of the liberal tradition and its
critics, I imagine I'm doing the same sort of thing you might do, and vice
versa. But I also have to teach intro to philosophy, basic ethics, logic, etc.,
whereas you'd be asked to teach (I'm guessing) intro to american government or the american
legal system ot intro to comparative politics or what
have you. Prepping those different courses also plays a role in shaping how we
think about and approach issues, no?

To which I replied: The teaching part varies a lot. I'm
certainly not expected to teach comparative politics or American government; I
could spend all year teaching Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau in one context or
another. I have some political scienc-y and some
legal interests, so I don't do that; but it's not my teaching requirements that
keep me attached to political science. Indeed, at Chicago
it works the other way 'round. Everyone has to teach in the Common Core, which
means that even the most quantitative political scientist will probably have to
teach Tocqueville or Hobbes or Plato once per year, and even the most analytic
philosopher of mind will probably teach a history of philosophy once per year--
in other words, the teaching requirements keep the political scientists and
philosophers tethered to political theory/ political philosophy/ history of
ideas, which is part of what makes this place so much fun.

Finally, Aeon thinks that the dominance of
Oxford-Harvard analytic ethics within political philosophy is

starting to change...There's a
revival of interest in Scottish-enlightenment/moral sense theory, the
neo-Aristotelian wing has both libertarian and communitarian sub-groups, and
the range of offerings in history of ideas seems to be expanding.

Aeon's a philosopher and I'm not,
but I don't yet see evidence of that change percolating through to the top
journals or top philosophy departments. Sometimes such places are slow to sense
major intellectual changes that later crash on top of them, but they also
maintain substantial agenda-setting power themselves. (Note that, for now, I'm
agnostic on whether the dominance of the analytic style within philosophy is
a bad thing; as I said before, it allows for considerable rigor and for
argument-in-common-terms that permits of refutation. I am, as it were, not a
citizen of philosophy and don't want to commit myself to a view about the
direction philosophy as a discipline should be going.)

Other contributions: Brian
Weatherson on philosophy of language,
linguistics, and the intra-philosophy hierarchy (I stand corrected). Brad De Long, Matt Yglesias, and Stuart Buck on Nozick. (Incidentally, I just read a paper that
cited work of Brad's, for the first time that I'm
aware of.) Julian
Sanchez, making the case for rigor. I'm really enjoying reading everyone
else's posts on these questions; I'm learning a great deal.